


through the attic window

by dreamrafters



Category: Original Work
Genre: Banter, Car Accidents, Cats, Creepy Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff and Humor, Frottage, Gen, Haunted Houses, Heavy Petting, Husbands, M/M, Married Couple, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Paranormal, Snowed In, Vermont, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-04 23:02:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14030760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamrafters/pseuds/dreamrafters
Summary: The sky’s face had darkened and shifted without much warning, mild afternoon and the warmth of late autumn sunlight left hidden behind an impenetrable veil of cloud. Dusk threatened to fall at only a few minutes past five o’clock and that’s something they’d gone and forgotten, Denny knows, though there’s no helping it now that the sun is gone and the horizon bleeds the color of crushed lilac.[[Or: Husbands Denny and Ezra run their car off the road in a Vermont blizzard and seek refuge in a mountain inn overnight to weather the storm. Wherein there's lots of banter, a tough-as-nails landlady, and maybe a resident spook or two.]]





	1. Chapter 1

  
The sky’s face had darkened and shifted without much warning, mild afternoon and the warmth of late autumn sunlight left hidden behind an impenetrable veil of cloud. Dusk threatened to fall at only a few minutes past five o’clock and that’s something they’d gone and forgotten, Denny knows, though there’s no helping it now that the sun is gone and the horizon bleeds the color of crushed lilac.

When the first flakes had begun to fall and melt on the hood of the rental car, they’d both laughed in delight and pulled off on the shoulder to catch the wet crystals in their hair and hands, filled with some sort of childlike enchantment despite being well past the brink of 30. Ezra had never seen snow and Denny could only remember it from the furthest corners of his youth, a handful of Christmases spent at his grandmother’s overstuffed house in Syracuse before the whole family packed up their life into cardboard boxes and fled south to warmer waters.

That was nearly an hour ago, though, and after they’d piled back into the car and continued the trek north the light dusting of white had only gotten thicker.

The skyline almost looks ironclad now, steely and frozen. Ezra lets out a low swear from the driver seat and nudges the lever for the windshield wipers up to the next setting so snow smears faster across the glass.

“Forecast said no snow on the ground ‘til Thursday afternoon at the earliest,” Ezra says, eyebrows rising almost comically high on his forehead while he drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Here we are, Denny. It’s Tuesday.”

“Maybe it’ll taper off,” Denny offers, hoping to be helpful until he realizes his voice sounds doubtful to his own ears. “You know I don’t go around predicting the weather.”

Ezra reaches up and pulls his knit cap off with a sigh before tossing it on the dash, dark hair cow-licked and sticking up every which way. Denny wants to reach over and smooth it back into place but figures right now may not be the best time.

“We’re not gonna make it up to the lodge if this gets any worse,” Ezra snaps. “There’s nearly two hours left on the GPS and I can barely see the damn road as it is.”

“Do you want me to drive?” Denny asks, trying not to sound strained. His fingers have strayed to the fringed end of his scarf, absently picking at the threads while the wind begins to keen outside the car.

“No,” Ezra says, terse. But then he glances sideways at his husband and his features soften when he looks back toward the road. “Just—try and find somewhere we can stop until this blows over, alright? A motel, maybe a diner or something where we can get a cup of coffee at least.”

They’re so far-flung into the hills of northern Vermont that Denny hasn’t seen a fast food joint in two hours and a gas station in about half that. Every small gift shop or mom n’ pop place they’ve passed since then has been dark and unwelcoming, some of the windows already boarded up tight and shuttered for the season. The number of streetlamps had dwindled down to zero and their headlights are the only thing illuminating the dark and winding road ahead.

By the grace of some higher power he’s got one last bar of cell service, but it still isn’t enough to pull up the local weather report on his phone. Denny reaches over to turn on the radio and switches back and forth between the static FM and AM frequencies without any luck in finding a blizzard forecast.

“I don’t think this is blowing over anytime soon,” Denny says quietly. He chances a look at Ezra and then brings a thumb up to his mouth, trying not bite at a hangnail before he delivers the next blow. “We might need to turn around.”

“Turn _around?_ ” Ezra nearly shouts. “We’re already more than halfway there!”

“There’s nothing up here that’s open, Ez,” Denny says, cutting him a pointed look. “What isn’t already shut down for the season closed up shop for Thanksgiving weekend.”

Ezra blows out a long sigh through his teeth but doesn’t slow the car despite the snow falling faster by the moment. He grips the wheel and leans forward to squint through the windshield, steering them around a sharp hairpin turn that leads up an incline cut through the towering trees.

“There’s nowhere to turn around up here on these two-lane mountain roads,” he says, accelerating up the hill with a roar of the engine. “Do you see anywhere to turn around, Denny, because I can barely see a goddamn thi—”

The car hits a shallow divot in the road and then slides, the wheels locking up despite Ezra’s hands on the wheel trying to keep them from careening off the freezing asphalt. Time slows to a crawl and still moves in a blur. Denny shouts and the car doesn’t stop, spinning around off the narrow roadway until it finally careens onto the shoulder and smashes into something hard with a _crack!_

Denny’s ears are ringing when he opens his eyes. The airbags never deployed but his head is pounding anyway, a sharp pain throbbing like a heartbeat above his right temple. He reaches up to touch the hot skin and looks down at his fingers in the dark, surprised they haven’t come away bloody. It takes a few more seconds before he can decipher some of the words that have been coming out of Ezra’s mouth.

“Denny?” he says, voice rising in a dazed panic. “Are you alright? Why the fuck aren’t you saying anything?”

“I’m alright,” Denny says, reaching down to fumble for his seatbelt but not quite finding the release button. “Think I might’ve hit my head on the window or something.”

Ezra swears something low and dirty and tears himself out of the driver’s seat, and only when he struggles to get the door open does Denny realize they’re tipped at an odd angle in what must be a ditch, everything loose in the car thrown and fallen against the lower passenger side. Through the windshield he can see now that the thing that finally stopped them was the unyielding trunk of a birch tree.

“Hold on, I’m coming around,” Ezra pants, squeezing out the door and letting it slam behind him once he’s braced himself against the side. He slips a few times but manages to get around the front of the car, passing through a lone headlight beam and around the tree before bending down to jiggle the handle on Denny’s door.

“Pull the lock up,” he says from close to the window, the glass briefly fogging up with a puff of hot air. Denny does as he says and then the bottom of the door is scraping through the frozen grass and Ezra is all over him, inspecting his face and hands and looking vaguely manic and wild-eyed while the keys hang in the ringing ignition.

“I don’t see anything too bad,” Ezra says, cold fingertips briefly skimming the sore spot on Denny’s forehead with his bottom lip caught between his teeth. His dark eyes peer into a pair of lighter ones as if he’s searching for any sign of a concussion, and when he’s done he looks up and down the desolate roadway while wet snow gathers in his hair. “Do you feel like you can walk?”

“Yeah,” Denny says, reaching for his seatbelt again, but Ezra’s already reached in and undone it for him so he can gently haul the other man out into the boggy ditch he’s standing in. He finally pulls the keys from the ignition and they both stagger back up to the edge of the road to look down at the wrecked rental in silence. Without words they both seem to understand that the car isn’t going anywhere, at least not anytime soon.

“Shit,” Ezra says at long last, turning left and then right to gaze at the thick darkness sprawling in both directions. “We should probably call somebody.”

Denny’s phone has been clenched in his right hand the entire time. He looks down at its backlit screen and the single service bar is long gone, a roaming alert flashing its tiny digital caution sign. Even when he dials 911 the tone cuts out and the call drops into thin air, the only sound around them the shrill howling of wind as it whips through the treetops. They’ve only been outside the car for a few minutes and the tip of his nose already feels frozen.

“There’s no service up here,” he says in a tight voice, temple still throbbing. Ezra doesn’t say anything and so Denny makes a vague gesture toward the half-wrecked rental with its one working headlight still shining into the maze of trees. “Better turn that off so it doesn’t kill the battery.”

Ezra leans back down into the car and cuts the lights before stumbling back up to Denny’s side, broad-shouldered frame breathing harder now. It’s so dark that only his silhouette and the whiteness of his teeth are visible and the thought of nothing but that all-encompassing blackness for miles makes a shiver coil up Denny’s spine. Without thinking he reaches out and searches for Ezra’s hand until their cold fingers brush, and then does his best to press their stiff palms together.

“We could get back in the car and run the heat every twenty minutes or so,” Ezra says, his voice sounding muffled now that the snowfall has grown thicker. “See if somebody drives by or just hold out ‘til morning.”

Denny knows they’re staring down the barrel of an ugly whiteout but he doesn’t want to say it out loud just yet. His head is sore and he’s shivering and there’s nothing or nobody for miles, and no doubt they’ll go hypothermic and freeze to death out here without decent shelter but telling Ezra any of that seems like too much work right now. He squeezes his eyes shut for a long moment and reaches up to wipe the melting snow from his face, and when he reopens them he sees a pinprick of faint gold shining through the trees. It’s dull like a dying firefly but it doesn’t blink out, and when he picks up Ezra’s hand to point toward it he learns it wasn’t his imagination after all.

“I see it,” Ezra says, teeth clattering together enough that he grimaces and clenches his jaw to try and hide it. “What do you think it is?”

“Something worth investigating, I hope,” Denny says. He slowly drops Ezra’s hand and lets it lower between them, trying to think of anything valuable strewn about their luggage in the car. “We can’t stay out here in this for too long. You got your wallet and the keys?”

Ezra pats himself up and down, first his coat pockets and then the ass of his jeans. “Yeah, it’s all there,” he says, face scrunched up against the cold. “But how the hell are we supposed to get back to the car if we walk all the way out there and it’s nothing? Shit’s only coming down harder now and it’s pitch dark out here.”

Denny turns and looks down the road due north and then back at the faint light, situated somewhere off to the northeast. “Turn west and start walking until we hit the road again, I guess,” he says, even though every single waking part of him hopes that isn’t the case. “C’mon.”

They dig their coats out of the trunk and fetch Ezra’s formerly abandoned hat from the dashboard before locking up the car and making for the forest’s edge. The trees at the entrance are younger and slimmer and give way to broader trunks the further into the woods they walk, boots crunching and sliding through the freezing foliage gathered on the ground. Denny turns on his cell flashlight for a few minutes to lead the way, but as the distant light grows closer he turns it back off and reaches out to keep Ezra close instead.

“Maybe it’s a serial killer’s lair,” Ezra huffs from nearby, laughing a little so a cloud of breath bursts on the air. “Some backwoods Vermont hillbillies. If you start to hear banjos playing we’re high-tailing it the fuck outta here.” 

“Good thing I run faster than you,” Denny says, smiling despite the tired and cold making his bones ache. His jeans are nearly soaked through clear up to the knee and his wool coat is damp but still warm enough, just clammy and hanging heavy on his shoulders. His eyes sting and he has to bite back a curse when he remembers he left his glasses in the car. If he takes his contacts out he won’t be able to see five feet in front of him.

“Would I be here right now if I never dumped Stan the weatherman back when we were in college?” Ezra says, boots scuffing as he tries to navigate around a throng of gnarled tree roots and wet leaves. “Honest question.”

“Stan was a tool,” Denny says flatly. “Besides, he wouldn’t have taken you on a romantic getaway to the great white north, now would he? You’d probably be following him around some shitty conference in Reno where weather dudes beat off to meteorology reports.”

Ezra barks out a laugh that turns slightly sour at the tail end. “True,” he grunts, “but at least we wouldn’t be out in the freezing fucking co— _shit!_ ”

His feet slide out from underneath him in a rush and down he goes over an exposed root with both arms flailing, landing hard on his right knee on the frozen ground. He doesn’t make a sound but only lets the fall happen in full, slumping off to the side once he’s made contact with the earth, face screwed up in an expression of disgrace and pain.

“Well,” Ezra says after a few long moments of breathing heavily through his nose. He shifts a little, experimentally bending his knee with a sharp hiss. “I don’t think it’s too broken.”

“Too broken?” Denny yelps, hunching over Ezra where he’s prone on the ground. “Jesus, Ez, it’d better not be broken at all.”

“Help me get up, would you darling,” Ezra says with a mouthful of sarcasm, and Denny prods the toe of his boot into Ezra’s rear but holds out a hand to help him. He groans like a dying beast all the way up but holds his own once he’s back on both feet, grimacing while Denny tries to brush some of the damp leaves and dirt off his ass.

“Will you quit that,” Ezra says. “I don’t need you groping me when I’m incapacitated.”

“It’s probably just bruised, you big baby,” Denny tells him. “Like my goddamn head, thanks to your superior off-roading skills back there.”

Ezra squints at him through the dark, bringing their faces close enough that Denny can feel his breath on one cheek. “I can’t see anything yet,” he says. Any of the banter in his voice from before has slipped away, replaced with something softer. “We’ll have to look at it somewhere in the light.”

“If we even make it to the light without dying out here,” Denny laments, hooking his arm through Ezra’s elbow before they start walking again at a slower and steadier pace. “Watch your step, I think we’re almost there.”

The wailing wind from before has lost some of its vibrato and dulled into a low keening, everything around them seeming muffled under the weight of falling snow. Their soft yellow beacon grows brighter the further they walk and eventually Denny can make out the vague shape of a metal lamppost sticking up out of the ground.

“Oh good, just wonderful,” Ezra says when they cross a narrow road to reach it, tipping his head back to look at the bulb burning at the top. “We’ve made it to Narnia.”

Denny ignores him and walks over to the low wooden sign staked into the ground not too far from the lamp’s base. Snow has already begun piling up in tiny drifts on the posts and he squats down to peer at the letters carved into the face. The paint is beginning to peel but under the light of the lamppost he can read _The Fisher Cat Inn_.

“There must be a place nearby,” Denny says, straightening back up to look around. The lamp’s glow only casts so far, leaving inky darkness outside their golden circle of pale light. It’s an eerie sort of feeling—like anything watching could see them looking in, lit up and vulnerable, but they can’t see anything looking out. “Do you see a little side trail or turnoff anywhere?”

“Can’t say I do,” Ezra says, turning in a wide circle with his arms hanging at his sides. “But I’ve got a sinking suspicion we walked all this way for nothing but the exercise and scenery.”

Denny’s patience and energy is wearing thinner by the moment but he doesn’t snap, only starts down the new road at a good clip. Ezra watches him disappear into the shadows and lingers behind for only two or three seconds before hobbling after him.

“Where are we going now?” he asks, limping some while he tries to hurry without putting too much weight on his right knee.

“Walking a little further for the exercise and scenery,” Denny says, half-turning for a beat so Ezra can catch up. “Since I’m not really looking forward to freezing my ass off in a lime green Prius and listening to you whine all night.”

Ezra’s face is mostly obscured in the dark but Denny can practically hear his rakish grin. “Popsicle Prius or not, you get to listen to me all night long anyhow, babe.”

“I’m the luckiest man alive,” Denny murmurs, holding one arm out ahead of himself while he walks. There’s a dark shape looming ahead, high and broad, seemingly some kind of structure built up in the midst of the forest. Denny walks up to it and touches the surface with cold hands, feeling the frozen crunch of dying leaves beneath his fingers, then brings his cell phone out to light up their way. He and Ezra are standing in front of an old brick and mortar wall covered in ivy, extending as far as they can see in both directions and about a foot above their heads.

“Must be an old garden wall,” Denny says, shining his light along it as he walks. The snow here is deep enough that his boots are leaving shallow prints now as they crunch through the ice. “Look for a door or a gate or something.”

“We could just climb over it,” Ezra suggests.

“With my concussion and your busted knee, absolutely,” Denny tells him, already walking away again. He’s so cold that his face is going numb in the biting chill, and he tries in vain to wrap the length of his scarf around his nose and chin.

Ezra hurries to catch up again, trampling along through the snow at Denny’s side. Other than the wind their footsteps are the only sounds in the silent forest. Denny keeps his eyes peeled for an opening in the garden wall, and after they’ve walked for what feels like a small eternity he finds an alcove cut into the old brick. Tendrils of dead ivy hang down over the archway and twist through the bars of an old wrought iron gate hung there. But there’s no keyhole or padlock and it only takes a few moments of pulling the browning shrubbery away before Denny finds the latch and forces the gate open with a rusted squeal.

He quickly shines his light through to the other side and then cuts it off, having only managed to see a brick pathway and the garden’s sprawl.

“We might get tagged for trespassing,” Denny says through his scarf as he pokes his head through the alcove. “Least we’d spend the night in a warm jail cell.”

“Or filled with two rounds of buckshot,” Ezra hisses behind him. “You don’t know who the hell lives out here during the off-season, or if they’ll be happy about two guys crawling through their back garden in the dark.”

Denny bites into his bottom lip and contemplates that for a moment, but he’s so goddamn cold that it doesn’t take him too long to weigh out the risk and reward. “Stay back here if you want, and if I yell run you haul ass back to the road,” he says as he starts down the pathway. “I’m going to see if the inn is still open.”

“You aren’t leaving me back here,” Ezra says before stomping after him. “And why are you being so hardheaded tonight? I swear, you must’ve knocked something loose when you hit your head on the damn car window.”

 The garden path makes a wide turn and leads them under a trellis covered in dormant honeysuckle, and beyond that a lone window twinkles like a gold tooth set back into the face of a looming house. “That was your fault, by the way,” Denny reminds him as they pass a stone bird bath filling up with a powdery layer of snow.

“I know,” Ezra grumbles, “but _Jesus_.”

“Jesus ain’t gonna help you now if you’re out here up to no good,” a new voice sounds from somewhere in the near darkness. It’s reedy in pitch and belongs to a woman, but Denny and Ezra both stop dead in their tracks when they hear the telltale pump of a live shotgun.  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

  
“Hands where I can see them,” the woman says, waiting until they comply. “If you move too fast I’ll do just the same.”

“We’re not here to cause any trouble,” Denny says. His hands are trembling from more than the cold now that he’s got both palms raised toward heaven. “We were just looking—we were hoping to find the inn.”

Boots shift atop frozen leaves but they still can’t see the woman with her gun held on them more than an inky shape in the darkness. “That’s funny, considering most guests come up through the front instead of hopping my wall,” she says. “Inn’s been closed since the middle of September. Advertised as such in every travel pamphlet from here to the state line.”

“Our car wrecked on the main road,” Ezra says quickly. “Slid on the asphalt and hit a tree.”

“Is that so?” the woman asks, still sounding skeptical.

“We were trying to get up to the mountain lodge by tonight but didn’t know the snow would be coming this early,” Denny says, racking his brain for any way to make this not look bad. “We had a room reserved for Thanksgiving weekend. You can call up there—”

“Shit, I don’t need to call,” the woman says, and then goes quiet for a long moment. They hear something like keys jingling and then a pocket flashlight is clicking on, shining up the few feet between them. She briefly passes the beam across Denny and Ezra’s faces and then clicks it off again. “You don’t talk like anybody from around here, and you look just about frozen solid anyhow. Damn robbers would have more sense than to be out here dressed like that.”

 Denny blows out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding so tight, sharp enough that it burns his lungs. He lets his hands slowly sink back down to his side inch by inch and sees Ezra doing the same from the corner of his eye.

“We were hoping you’d have a room open for the night,” he says. “Nothing fancy, cash on the table, just something to keep us out of the cold until we can get our car back on the road.”

“Whole place is getting renovated,” the woman says. “Every room is torn out from the ground up. Closed down early so the new owners could start up their little facelift project— _modernize_ , is what they’d said.”

Denny feels Ezra’s eyes on him through the dark, and fresh confusion steeped in waning fear is practically palpable between them.

“Uh, well,” Ezra says. “Do you have a landline we can use at least?”

The woman only grunts and turns her flashlight back on. They watch as she hefts her gun around to hang down by her side, hand still positioned near the trigger almost casually. “Start up the path and keep going ‘til you hit the terrace. I’ll be right behind you.”

The men start up the path together, shoulder to shoulder, not speaking but letting their arms brush every few yards or so. Even if Denny wanted to pass a reassuring touch to the back of Ezra’s hand, they’re both so cold now that he doubts either of them could feel it. He wonders if the woman is alone and how they’d get the gun away long enough to overpower her, or if he and Ezra are being marched like prisoners into a house full of lurking psychopaths. The endless possibilities flicker in a looping film reel through his mind one after another.

Further ahead the massive shape of the inn finally comes into view. It’s fuzzy and indistinct through the falling snow, though there’s that single window lit up high on what seems to be the third floor. Below that it’s all dark save for the fraternal twin of the lamppost from back yonder, this one wrapped in the remnants of what looks like timeworn party tinsel.

When their boots are on the terrace, Denny and Ezra slowly turn to look at their armed guide. It’s still too dark to make out much detail and she’s pulled the hood of an oversized jacket up to hide her face from the cold.

“Well, head on in,” she says, idly gesturing with the barrel of her gun. “There’s a phone through the kitchen door if you want to try and call for roadside, but I guarantee you won’t get anybody out in this shit ‘til morning or even later than that.”

“So…” Ezra starts to say while he eyeballs Denny for help, but she waves her free hand and tramples up the terrace steps to cut between them, a full head shorter than either man.

“So I reckon that means you two are gonna need a place to sleep and something hot in your bellies,” the woman says. She shoves open a wooden door peeling with a century’s worth of whitewash and hits a switch so yellow light is suddenly spilling out onto their feet and the ground. “Come on in out of the cold before we all catch our goddamn death out here.”

She shuts and locks the door once Denny and Ezra have hesitantly edged inside, standing dumbly in the middle of an ancient kitchen with an iron potbelly stove and brick hearth. There are newer amenities installed among the old, a stainless steel cooler and an oven big enough to cook for a small army, but the painted tile work and cabinetry is all Victorian at best. The fireplace is dark but the old stove is burning away, sleepy orange flames visible through a vent in the iron door.

“I’ve seen drowned rats that look better than you two,” the woman says, breaking her shotgun down so it hangs in the crook of one arm. “We’ll have to get you a change of clothes here in a minute.”

Denny’s eyes spin around the pale blue kitchen and then finally land on their new hostess. She pushes her hood back and reveals an aged face that isn’t nearly as lined or pinched as he might’ve imagined through the pitch of her voice alone. Her silvering hair is pulled into a bun but a few wiry curls have freed themselves from the tie to corkscrew around her temples, and she squints one eye shut and blows them off her forehead while she looks right back without any qualms or hesitation. From what Denny can tell, she’s wearing snow boots under a duster nightgown hiked up around her knees and a plaid man’s coat about three sizes too big for her body. With the shotgun hanging over her arm, she’s probably the most bizarre but formidable sight he’s ever laid eyes on.

Ezra clears his throat, still shivering but braver now that they’re in the light. “Have you ever seen that movie with Kathy Bates?” he asks, looking at her ensemble with earnest curiosity. “Where she beats the hell out of her kids with a belt.”

“You must be a comedian _,_ ” the woman says, moving across the kitchen now on light feet despite the heaviness of her boots. She knocks on the hardwood surface of a small table near the fireplace and gestures for them to take a seat. “Got a name about you?”

“I’m Ezra,” Ezra tells her plainly, and then nods toward his partner. “And this is Denton, my hus—”

“Denny,” Denny cuts in over him with a purposeful scuff of his chair across the floor. He catches Ezra’s eye and shakes his head the barest bit. “Most people just call me Denny.”

“Listen, it don’t burn my butt none that y’all only need one bed,” the woman says from the sink where she’s busy filling up a tea kettle. “Makes it easier on me, as a matter of fact, considering there’s only one other in this entire place that isn’t mine.”

Ezra screws his face up to keep from laughing and makes a tiny sound that might be a squeak. Denny swallows thickly and doesn’t say anything for a few moments, suddenly realizing how dry his throat’s gone from being out in the wind. “Well,” he says at last. “Can we ask for yours?”

“What, my name?” the woman asks, setting her kettle down on the iron stovetop. She cracks the shotgun back together but sets it down in a corner before leaning against the counter, arms crossed over her front. “Bonny Ann.”

“You’re the innkeeper here?” Denny asks her. There’s a plain wedding ring on her finger and a skeleton key hanging on a long chain around her neck, and there’s no other sign or indication so far that they’ll be joined by another soul anytime soon.

“Used to be, more like some sorry excuse for a caretaker now,” Bonny Ann says. “I’m just holding down the fort until the new owners fly up from Savannah and start tearing it apart. Soon as they get here, I’m gone.” 

She moves around the kitchen to gather up two matching cups and a porcelain sugar bowl. Rattles around in a bottomless silverware drawer for a pair of teaspoons shaped like seashells and then produces a carton of milk from the humming fridge. Denny knows he and Ezra have never made a habit of drinking hot tea, but neither of them bother finding the words or will to protest her. They sit in easy silence and both spot the lean white cat that pads into the kitchen and curls up in a basket near the stove, wholly uninterested in the new guests.

“You said we don’t sound like we’re from around these parts, but you don’t sound much like a northerner yourself,” Ezra says. He’s inched his chair closer to the potbelly stove despite the cat’s twitching ears, one little scoot at a time. They’re both nearly dripping puddles on the floor now that they’ve begun to thaw. “Where’re you from, originally?”

Bonny Ann gives him a knowing look and the tiniest twitch of what might be a smile. “My folks hail from Texas,” she says. “I didn’t move to Vermont, I married into it. But now that—well. I just ain’t got much reason left to stay now that the inn’s changed hands.”

The teapot starts whistling and she takes it off the burner, dropping two little bags into each cup before filling them up with hot water. “Tell me something about yourselves,” she says. When neither one makes to open their mouth, she sets their cups down on the table with a _thunk_ and says, “Where you’re from, for starters.”

“Florida,” Ezra volunteers, happily wrapping his hands around the hot mug of tea. “Born and raised. But Denny was born up north before his family moved south.”

“Oh yeah?” Bonny Ann asks. She finally settles down in a third chair at the table with a plate of what looks like corn muffins, though they can see her shotgun still rests in the corner behind her right shoulder well within reach. “Wouldn’t have pegged you for a snowbird.”

“We moved from upstate New York when I was just a kid,” Denny says. “Probably four, five years old at the most. It never really stuck on me—I call Florida home because it’s all I really know.”

Bonny Ann hums at that, drumming her fingers on the edge of the table without hurry while they sip around their tea and bite into cornbread slathered with honey butter. She’s still wearing her overlarge coat, so big on her frame that the undone zipper nearly scrapes the floor. The plaid pattern is old and faded and clearly well-loved, maybe a little beyond its years now. Denny looks at a worn leather patch stitched on one of the elbows and feels the warming burn of curiosity.

“Belonged to my late husband,” Bonny Ann says, following his eyes with ease. “Sam’s been gone ten years. Lung cancer is what did it, smoked all his life. Only reason I’m not in a hole next to him yet is because I never let the man light up in the house.”

Ezra sucks down the last of his tea and reaches for another corn muffin that he eats in two hearty bites. Bonny Ann waits until they’re both done and then pushes back from the table, rising like some spindly cormorant. She looks at the water on the floor under their boots and sniffs, hitching one hand up high on her hip.

“Well, like I said,” she starts, “I only got the one room, and it isn’t usually suited for guests, but it’ll have to make do in a pinch.”

“How much cash can we give you for it?” Denny says immediately, reaching into his inner coat pocket to look for his wallet. “Least we can do for showing up like we did without any warning.”

Bonny Ann waves a hand through the air and gives a firm shake of her head. “Don’t want or need it,” she says. “Hold onto it so you can get your car fixed up in the morning, and maybe call that mountain lodge so they know you ain’t coming anytime soon.”

Denny rings the lodge and lays out their story within earshot, everything from the wrecked rental to stumbling upon the Fisher Cat. After he hangs up Bonny Ann leads them from the kitchen quarters and down a short hallway, flipping on lights and lamps as they go along. Some of the lanterns seem to spring to life before she even touches them. The white cat gets up from its basket and follows as if by custom, thin tail bent like a shepherd’s crook while he brings up the rear.

The inn was clearly once a house for a single family, long since repurposed into something meant to entertain a modest handful of people and coupled guests. White sheets drape over most of the furniture that’s left and any small furnishings like books or vases have seemingly been packed and carted away to other places. The house doesn’t quite echo their footsteps so much as it groans in spite of them, like it hadn’t been expecting the burden of any guests on such late notice in the midst of such a cold night.

They move up the first flight of carpeted stairs and then down a longer hallway wallpapered with gold and garnet flowers, past ten or twelve different doors all shut tight to keep the heating out. Each one has a brass number and tiny metal plaque screwed into the lacquered wood, and in passing Denny manages to read one of the engravings on the door to room 8.

“The Captain’s Den,” he says aloud, still plodding along in Bonny Ann’s wake, lips halfway parted in thought. “Did this place belong to anybody in particular before it was yours?”

“Passed down through a family of locals, apparently the tradition died when the last son only had a single daughter and she sold it off to move out west with her new-money honey,” the woman says. “Can’t say I blame her too much, considering how much work goes into an old house like this. Lord know that’s why I finally decided to give it up.”

She steers them toward the dead-end of the hall and then abruptly faces left, reaching for a tiny brass knob surrounded by wallpaper that most people wouldn’t have spotted even if they werr searching for it. Bonny Ann twists her wrist and the wall gives way to a dark passage hidden behind the paneling, narrower than any other doorway in the house.

Ezra immediately stiffens and pushes himself against Denny’s shoulder, the two of them blinking up at the wall of darkness until Bonny Ann fumbles long enough to find a pull-cord and yanks an old bulb into life. Ahead of them is another flight of bare wooden stairs, dimly lit and just wide enough for a single body to move up toward a door on the landing at the top.

“Hm,” Ezra hums in his chest, lips pressed into a painfully thin line. Even without spoken words passing between them Denny can practically hear him making another nervous wisecrack about serial killers to belie his unwillingness to go any further. In the same moment Denny also remembers he’s so cold and dead-dog tired that he’s prepared to face the risk of stumbling into the open arms Hannibal Lecter himself if it meant he could lay down in a warm bed and not get up again for at least ten hours.

“Y’all look like you’ve seen a damn ghost,” Bonny Ann tuts, reaching to pull the chain and brass skeleton key from around her neck. “It’s just the stairs up to the attic bedroom, for heaven’s sake. Now mind your feet, they’re steeper than they look.”

She goes up first without any more dawdling, hiking her nightgown up in one fist and sliding the other along the well-worn handrail. Denny bumps his hip into Ezra’s and then goes up next, peering down the empty hallway one last time before he disappears into the entryway. The white cat that followed them sits back on his haunches and doesn’t move, gone as still as a tiny sphinx. He blinks two golden eyes but makes no attempt to follow them up the stairs.

“I’m coming with you,” Ezra whispers in a hurry, as if there’d been any remote chance he’d stay behind, sticking a hand up under Denny’s coat to snag a finger through his belt loop. They stomp up the creaking stairs in a single file and then linger below the landing while Bonny Ann swears under her breath and turns her key in the lock.

“Gets stuck sometimes,” she says once the door has finally clicked open. “Never was that way before Jason left.”

She trails off with a quiet sniff and then pushes inside, and they’re greeted all at once with more darkness. Bonny Ann reaches around to feel along the wall and hits another switch that fills the room with dusty golden light. It’s only then that Denny remembers the lone window lit up from the inside while they were still down in the garden, though he doesn’t know how the light went out between that moment and this one. Maybe it was a different room altogether.

The attic still has rough wooden beams crisscrossing portions of the room, so old now that they’re probably petrified if termites haven’t managed to set in sometime during the last century. One side of the room is full of boxes and apple crates but otherwise plainly but comfortably furnished with an old dresser, a scarred wooden desk and its matching chair, and a bookcase sagging with old paperbacks and oddments stacked high on every shelf. The iron bedframe is wide enough for two people and done up with plain blankets and pillows, and when Bonny Ann snaps the top quilt in the air a cloud of fine dust billows up from it like smoke.

“I’ll have to get you some more quilts from downstairs,” she says, the remark more practical than anything touched by embarrassment. “The heating gets real fickle about whether it comes up this far in the house or not. Jason always had his electric blanket, but you know that old thing is long gone now. Practically antique when he had it.”

Denny realizes he hasn’t spoken in quite some time and clears his throat, watching the dust slowly fall and settle back to the floor. Ezra isn’t pressed flat against his back now but he’s close enough that Denny can sense his sporadic trembling while chills tremor through his body.

“Who’s Jason?” he asks, still looking around the attic. There’s a yellowed and frail-looking poster for Pearl Jam on the far wall by the desk, still tacked up by more miracle than any tape or glue. A lava lamp on one of the bookshelves and a signed baseball not too far from it.

“Jason is my boy,” Bonny Ann says, moving around to the foot of the iron bed to open a wooden chest. “Was my boy,” she corrects herself after a long moment. “He’s passed on.”

She digs around for a moment, parting through old clothes and a leather jacket before she comes back up with some flannels and faded t-shirts. Another round of hunting through the chest turns up what looks like a terrycloth bathrobe and a sweatshirt printed with cracking letters.

“Best I can do unless y’all want to wear a couple of my old granny nightgowns,” Bonny Ann says, throwing the clothes on the bed. “These were clean when they went in here, but that was a while ago.”

She thuds across the floorboards and pushes open a door set into a slanted wall under the eaves. Another light comes on to reveal a tiny bathroom, not much more than a toilet and a pedestal sink. “Commode’s in here, but if you want a shower you’ll have to go down to the communal bathroom on the second floor landing. Should still be some towels and washcloths in there somewhere.”

“Uh, thank you—really, for doing all this,” Denny says, with Ezra echoing a plainer sentiment after him. They both stand a bit rigid in the middle of what appears to be a dead man’s childhood bedroom, afraid to move any further or touch anything. Bonny Ann heads back toward the stairs and pauses in the narrow doorway for only a second. “I’m going to get the extra blankets and bring a few more things up, so go ahead and get out of those wet clothes. There ain’t any hidden cameras up here or nothing, scout’s honor.”

She disappears down the stairwell and both men wait until they can’t hear the thud of her boots anymore before they move or speak. Ezra opens his mouth first, eyes gone wide in the faint light of the attic.

“Denny, I’ve done a lot for you but I’m not sleeping in a dead kid’s bed—”

“We’ll be fine,” Denny says, gently cutting him off. “There’s nowhere else we can go right now and she’s going out of her why to try and make us comfortable.”

Ezra throws his arms out and spins in a wide circle, taking in the sports trophies, a light-up globe of the world, and a small stuffed bear wearing a jersey all untouched by time. “You don’t know that,” he says, and then lowers his voice to a hoarse whisper. “What if he—what if he killed himself up here, man? What if they found him swinging from the rafters.”

Denny whips his head toward the stairwell and crosses the room in three short strides, peering down the steps before shutting the door. “Don’t say stuff like that,” he hisses. “What if she heard you?”

“The damn cat won’t even come up here,” Ezra says, raking a hand back through his hair. “You know how cats can sense— _things_.”

“I’ll let you stay up and do ghost watch, then,” Denny sighs, moving over to paw through the pile of clothes laid out on the foot of the bed. He checks the washed-out tags and is surprised to find that most of everything is probably something he and Ezra could fit into without too much trouble. Jason must’ve not been too young when he died, or if he was, he’d been one hell of a big kid.

“I can’t believe you’re wearing that stuff,” Ezra says, though he inches closer to peer up at a flannel shirt Denny is busy shaking out. He bends at the waist to sniff around the fabric of the sweatshirt and wrinkles his nose, hands still clutched tightly in front of him. “It smells weird.”

Denny carries a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt over to the privy door and bends to start unlacing his boots before disappearing inside the tiny bathroom. “So you’re sleeping naked, then, while it’s five degrees outside and about forty at best up here?” he asks, making a cursory survey of the half-empty bottle of cologne and a hairbrush still sitting on the shelf above the sink.

“Don’t I usually?” Ezra snorts, wandering around the room again. The light throws odd shadows through the exposed beams and he steers clear of the stacks of crates and boxes on the far side of the attic, though from a distance he can make out an odd bag of golf clubs and what looks like a wire dress form stuffed with crumbling tissue paper.

Denny emerges back into the room with his wet clothes and spreads them out over the beams to dry, leaving his coat on the back of the spindly desk chair. He’s still shivering despite the dry flannels and goes back over to the bed to pick up the old bathrobe before pulling it on and sashing it around his waist.

“Everything fits me fine,” he tells Ezra, only partway a lie because the pants were too long in the leg and had to be rolled up, but Ezra’s always been a hair taller anyway. He sits on the edge of the bed with a low creak and reaches for a small lamp on the dusty bedside table to tug the metal pull-chain, smiling despite himself when the light clicks on right away. “Quit being a baby and come put something warm on,” he says. “I’m not going to be the one to tell your mother you caught pneumonia and died up here because you refused to change clothes.”

“Dead guy clothes,” Ezra mumbles, though he trudges back over to the bed to pick up the lettered sweatshirt and flannel pajama pants. There’s a hole in one of the legs that he shows Denny by poking his middle finger through, and then they both jump and turn at the sound of knuckles rapping on the attic door.

“You decent?” Bonny Ann’s voice calls from the other side.

“Come in,” Denny answers, standing up from the bed when she walks back in carrying a small mountain of blankets and quilts. Her rubber-soled snow boots have been swapped for a pair of house slippers, likely the reason they hadn’t heard her coming on the stairs.

“Left the space heater at the bottom of the stairwell,” she says, dropping the bedding on the chest at the foot of the mattress with a small huff. “If one of you wants to go fetch it, by all means. Might do something about the chill up here.”

“We appreciate it,” Denny says in earnest, thought Bonny Ann doesn’t really seem to hear him. Her pale eyes have turned on the bath robe and flannel he’s wearing and since gone a bit vacant, as if she’d temporarily gotten lost somewhere in a time or place they couldn’t see.

“Jason was a good boy,” she says after a moment, expression still a bit hazy until she blinks and seems to snap out of it. “I shouldn’t say boy—he was a man when they shipped him off to Afghanistan, and he was a man when they brought him home in a pine box.” She reaches out to fidget some with the remaining clothes on the bed, straightening them a little before pulling her hands back and hiding them deep in her housecoat pockets. “But he’ll always be my boy, y’know?”

“I’m sorry you lost him,” Ezra says, still standing off to the side with the old clothes bundled in his arms. He shares a look with Denny over her head that only lasts a moment before the older woman is sighing and shaking her head.

“Shit happens,” Bonny Ann says. It sounds like something she’s repeated to herself and other people many times before. “Life happens, and then death happens too. You can’t ever plan for all of it the way you thought you could.”

Her slippers scuff on the floor as she turns to leave again, the skeleton key swinging on its cord around her neck once more. “Well, I’ll leave you to settle in since it’s getting late,” she says. “Don’t forget that heater, and if you need anything I’m the last door at the end of the hall past the kitchen.”

Ezra waits until she’s nearly to the door before he blurts out, “Would you have really shot us out there?”

Bonny Ann barks out a short laugh and gives him a wink through the dim light. “Son,” she drawls, “if I’d really wanted to pull the trigger, you wouldn’t have had a warning first.”

“Stone cold,” Ezra says, though he looks like he’s trying not to smile when he does. “I respect that.”

“That’s how they raise you down in Texas,” Bonny Ann replies, and then bids them one last goodnight. She shuffles onto the landing, leaving the door ajar as she takes the steps one at a time back down to the second floor.  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

  
  
Denny follows after she’s gone and collects the space heater left at the foot of the stairs as promised, though the long hall of guest rooms has gone dark and eerie save for one lantern lit up at the furthest end. He hurries back up the attic stairs and shuts the door to find that Ezra has finally disappeared into the tiny bathroom. There’s the sound of the toilet flushing and then water running shortly thereafter, so he turns off the brighter overhead light and leaves the lamp on to guide the way.

Denny finds an outlet behind the nightstand and plugs the heater in, sitting back down on the edge of the bed while it hums to life and glows red through the little metal grate. He’s so tired he’s almost into a lulled trance as the hot air starts warming his shins and steadily moves upward, thawing his cold bones from the outside in. When the bathroom door reopens he doesn’t even hear Ezra coming until he’s standing right in front of him, smelling like cold water and the faint mustiness of old clothes.

“I’m sorry about what happened on the road,” Ezra says quietly, bringing two gentle hands up to touch the bruising spot on Denny’s temple. They’re still a bit clammy but Denny leans into his husband’s palms anyway, closing his eyes as his forehead bumps into Ezra’s stomach. He’s never been so grateful to just be quiet and still for a moment.

“It’s alright,” he says softly, and means it. His eyes crack open a sliver to look at their dark shadows mingling on the floor, oblong and stretched but still blended together. “Things could’ve turned out a lot worse.”

“That’s what I worry about,” Ezra groans. He drops his head and presses a kiss somewhere near the nape of Denny’s neck, mouth warm and lingering even though the tip of his nose feels like ice. When he speaks again his lips curve into a smile. “At least you’re still pretty.”

Denny gets a handful of Ezra’s borrowed sweatshirt and tugs on it as he starts slumping back onto the mattress. “Get in bed, Ez,” he says. “I can barely see straight.” 

Ezra pulls the duvet back and coaxes Denny to crawl in under the covers. He unfurls the heaviest quilts Bonny Ann brought up and layers them over top of the bedding that was already there, tucking the ends down at the foot of the iron bedframe. The space heater is only making a small dent in the frigid attic air and he huddles in under the blankets as soon as he’s done and the light’s out, letting Denny pull him closer so they’re pressed together under the comforting weight of a half-dozen blankets.

“It’s so dark,” Ezra whispers, reaching around to wrap an arm over Denny’s waist. “I’d be shitting myself if I was alone up here.”

 Denny blinks against the blackness of the room and wonders how long it may take for their eyes to adjust. He remembers the square window above the desk but can’t seem to find it now, thinking the snowfall may be so thick outside that it blots out any silver light from the moon. For the moment he closes his eyes again, silently willing any warmth from his own body and Ezra’s to hurry up and melt some of the frigid stiffness from the sheets while the space heater puts out its best effort nearby.

“You’re still cold,” Ezra says, more observation than question. He pushes one of his knees up between Denny’s thighs and draws closer so they’re nearly pressed flush together. It’s a little awkward to fit all their bony knees and elbows together like rough-hewn puzzle pieces but Denny welcomes it for now. He lets himself be tucked up under Ezra’s chin and thinks a bit about thankfulness on top of roasted turkey and his mom’s homemade cranberry sauce, all of it abstract and wandering while he feels himself falling fast toward the veil of sleep.

He’s just about gone when Ezra starts squirming. Just a little at first, a few twitches of his hands and feet, and then it feels like he’s trying to angle his pelvis in the opposite direction without actually rolling over.

“Be still,” Denny groans, lips barely moving to form the words.

“I can’t help it,” Ezra says, shifting around some more. He giggles in the dark, nervous and scandalized, before whispering in a tightened voice. “It won’t go away.”

Denny wants to wallop him over the head with a pillow and shove him onto the floor, but instead opens his eyes and says, “ _What_ won’t go awa—oh.” 

Ezra has managed to slot their hips together good and tight, and the culprit burns like a heated brand against the soft flannel covering Denny’s inner thigh. He shifts around some himself, still exhausted but undeniably much more awake now. “I don’t even know how you’re getting it up when we were dying of hypothermia fifteen minutes ago.”

“Me neither,” Ezra says with his voice full of woe, and then presses closer still into Denny’s crotch. “Do you think we could—?”

“No,” Denny says flatly. “Absolutely not.”

“Just real quick,” Ezra whines. “I’ll do all the hard work.”

“You didn’t even want to sleep in here before, going on about cats and dead kids, and now you want to fuck?”

Ezra ponders that for a long moment. “I mean, we wouldn’t _technically_ be fucking,” he says at last. “More like some gentle love petting to take the edge off.”

Denny disentangles himself from Ezra’s limbs and rolls away as much as he can, huffing against the blue-black dark. “This woman has brought us into her home, into her dead son’s childhood bedroom, and given us his clothes from the goodness of her heart without asking for anything in return. Gone out of her way to accommodate us, Ezra.”

“And I say hallelujah amen,” Ezra says, reaching across the bed for Denny again. “But it’ll warm you up a whole lot quicker if we do than if we don’t.”

Denny buries his face in the musty pillow and moans. “I’ve never been more exhausted in my entire life.”

“Just help me out so I can go to sleep,” Ezra says, snuggling in closer. He mouths along the hinge of Denny’s jaw in the dark, fingers teasing the hem of his pajama pants somewhere beneath the blankets. “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow night at the lodge,” he says, gently rutting into the jut of Denny’s hip again.

“How’s that?” Denny asks, feeling his own voice gone a touch more throaty despite his best efforts to sound disinterested. A tiny silken thread of arousal tugs somewhere low in his belly but he won’t tell Ezra that, still lying limp and supine while the other man kisses up his neck.

“We can take our time, make an evening out of it,” Ezra says, slipping a few fingers under the waistband of Denny’s pajamas now. “They’ll have the fireplace and the marble bathroom, the big four-poster bed we saw in the photos,” he says, and Denny wants to laugh now but lets him keep on just to see how far it can go. “I’ll fuck you real slow until you start begging. All sweet and needy, just how you like it.”

“Hush up,” Denny says, glad it’s dark so Ezra can’t see him flush a blistering pink. He’s warmed right up now, so much they may need to start shedding blankets onto the floor. “I’d die if anybody heard you talking like that.” He doesn’t say anything about it not being true.

“The ghosts don’t care, babe,” Ezra says, and finally teases around the line of Denny’s cock beneath the soft flannel. Neither of them are wearing their underwear and he knows it all too well. “Either way, I hope they enjoy the show.”

Denny can feel himself getting hard but reaches down to wrap a hand around Ezra’s forearm, trying to stay him. “We’re going to make a mess,” he says. “We can’t—”

“I’ll clean it up,” Ezra tells him, hand skimming around to pull the waistband of Denny’s pajama bottoms down over the bare curve of his ass. When they’re twisted around his thighs Ezra fumbles with his own sweatpants and pushes them down, and that first searing touch when he slots their hips together is so good and sudden it makes heat prickle at the corner of Denny’s eyes.

“You drive a hard bargain,” he says hoarsely, giving himself over to his husband’s touch. He feels a hand pry between their bodies and then Ezra’s taking them both in his grasp, already shuddering against the soft friction. “Fuck, Ez.”

“I’ve got you,” Ezra says, giving their combined length a long stroke and smiling when Denny’s hips buck forward for more. “Didn’t take too long to warm up, huh.”

Denny grinds against him as much as he can and wraps a hand around the back of Ezra’s neck, holding on a little too tight. The hot satin slide of skin on skin is something too perfect to last. Their blanket cocoon is starting to verge on stifling and when Ezra begins panting and jerking faster Denny sends up a silent prayer that they’ll find their way to the end together. He slides his hands down to clutch Ezra’s ass and pushes into every nook and cranny of him, trembling now for a different reason, desire broken through him and gone wild and desperate as a runaway horse.

Ezra twists his palm on the next upstroke and his thumb brushes the flushed tip of Denny’s cock again and then one more time, and somehow that’s all it takes for them to tumble into bliss one after the other.

“Shh, shh now,” Ezra is whispering once they can see and speak again, pressing tiny kisses against Denny’s face while they pant against each other. Half the covers have been kicked down to the foot of the bed or hang halfway to the floor.  “You’ll wake the whole house up.”

Denny hadn’t even realized he’d been caught up in some mindless litany of swears and chanting Ezra’s name. It was over and done with so fast, pleasure snapped between them in a blazing whiplash. The iron bedframe creaks and moans and when Ezra tries to get up Denny holds him there despite the fine sheen of cooling sweat between their shoulder blades and at their temples.

“Stay here for a minute,” he says, finally letting his hand slide up to the curve of his husband’s spine.

“I’ll be right back,” Ezra says, voice full of content laughter, and presses one more kiss to Denny’s forehead before he sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Christ, I hope there’s a washrag in the bathroom.”

His eyes must have finally adjusted to the velvet darkness because Denny hears socked feet on the attic floorboards and then the yellowed light in the tiny water closet is clicking on. The faucet runs for a moment and there’s the sound of the mirrored cabinet above the sink opening and shutting. Denny pushes the remaining sheets down to his knees and watches Ezra’s silhouette come back from the bathroom carrying a damp cloth that he passes over without a word.

“I think we’re alright,” Ezra mumbles in a sheepish voice as he plucks at the front of his sweatshirt, now scrubbed damp and soggy. “Poor Catamount league here took the brunt of it.”

Denny cleans himself up and gets his clothes in order, wrinkling his nose as he hands the rag back over to Ezra. “We’re both going to hell,” he says before his voice splits into a wide yawn. Ezra only makes an amused noise in his chest before shuffling back to the sink and running the tap again. From where he’s lying in bed Denny watches as the other man rubs a finger across his teeth and pushes a futile hand through his mussed hair. They’d left all their toiletries back in the rental, probably frozen solid by now in the trunk of the car.

Ezra strips his sweatshirt off and leaves it hanging over a beam to dry, hurrying to dive back under the covers again even though the space heater has made the room almost bearable. He wriggles back into Denny’s open arms and a chill runs through him like a rippled current. His hands are freezing and he sticks them into the warm seat of Denny’s flannel pants, earning a muffled swear and some tired bitching for his effort.

They fall asleep to the ticking space heater and the soft, rhythmic sound of each other’s gentle breathing. The old house seems to let out a sigh it’d been holding before settling back on its haunches amidst the rising snow, content enough to be still for now.

The light in the attic stays dark for the first night in a long time.

#

Denny wakes to the weak-tea stain of early dawn filtering in through the attic beams like a barren ribcage. His nose is full of something musky and strong, pleasant but unfamiliar. It smells like sandalwood and fresh mint, maybe the barest touch of something warm he used to get pulled into when he hugged his grandfather’s neck on winter mornings.

The room is quiet and the space heater must’ve turned itself off sometime during the night. Ezra is lightly snoring in the bed next to him, still close but lying flat on his back now with the covers pulled up to his chin. Denny is careful not to wake him as he eases himself up and over to dangle his legs over the edge of the mattress. The floorboards are cold beneath his socked feet but somehow silent as he walks across the room to the brightening window above the desk.

The world through the glass is tinted a sea-colored green as if the window itself had been forged from the bottoms of old coke bottles, though there’s a milky crescent moon framed in lead set into the center. Denny can see through it but everything is slightly warped and if he moves too fast the landscape twists around itself like the inside of a kaleidoscope. Even so, there’s no denying the thick blanket of clean white covering everything outside. It’s almost sparkling in the new dawn, blue crystal sugar dusted along the eaves of the house and the top of the garden wall. Beautiful but eerie in its stillness all at the same time.

He leans away to move toward the bathroom and happens to glance down at the desktop. It’s sparsely decorated and a little scarred from years of use, only holding an old mug and a lamp set on a pile of what looks like old college textbooks. And then there’s a partial handprint pressed into the fine layer of dust at the edge of the wood, clean and unmistakable as if somebody had just balanced themselves there as they pushed the chair away from the desk.

Denny blinks and then looks at his fingers, expecting to find grey smudges even though there are none. He turns around and looks over to Ezra, still sleeping soundly, and then holds his right hand adjacent to the print. Even without pressing his palm down he can tell the fingers are longer than his and had probably belonged to a taller man. Taller than either him or Ezra.

Chills crawl and prickle over the backs of his arms but he only turns and quietly walks to the bathroom, shaking off the silly thoughts bouncing around in his head. Probably from some worker doing renovations or leftover from a home inspector, nothing more or less.

Denny props the toilet seat up and manages to squeeze out a morning piss despite how cold the tiny bathroom is. He thinks about the strange scent from when he’d first woken up and where it’d come from or where it had gone, if he’d been dreaming of his grandfather again and gotten too lost in the senses of memory. The bottle of cologne is still sitting on the shelf above the sink but he doesn’t dare touch it. Something not unlike a vague sense of dread tells him not to, if only for his own sake.

He’s shaking dry when the bathroom door squeaks open and Ezra is blearily looking in, all bedhead and puffy eyes. Denny’s soul nearly jumps clean from his body and he stumbles back, shoulder bumping into the narrow room’s slanted wall with a thud. He quickly tucks himself away and swears while his heart thuds like a drumhead in his chest.

Ezra seems perplexed but reaches for the glass bottle on the sink vanity anyhow, screwing the top off and bringing it up to his nose for a whiff. He makes a pinched face and holds it away again before huffing out a cough.

“Why the hell did you spray this shit?” he asks, setting the cologne back on its shelf. “Nearly choked on it waking up.”

Denny quickly washes his hands and moves past Ezra to get out of the bathroom, trying to keep himself from walking too fast. He goes over to turn the space heater back on and wonders if they’re both slowly losing their minds from a carbon monoxide leak. He sniffs the air again and the scent of the cologne is long gone.

Ezra remains mostly unconcerned as he flushes the toilet and walks across the attic room to peer out the same window Denny had looked through earlier. “That’s a lot of fucking snow,” he says, wrapping his arms around himself. He sniffs once and then promptly walks back over to the bed before folding his body back under the lingering warm beneath the heavy blankets. “Perfect morning to sleep in.”

“Sleep?” Denny repeats, because right now it’s probably the last thing on his mind, somewhere in line behind spectral manifestations and dying from a furnace leak. “We have to call and get the car towed, then call the rental company, and _then_ call the lodge again in case the road is blocked off—”

Ezra has already grappled his dying cell phone off the bedside table and turned it on long enough to check the time. “It’s ten past six in the morning, Denny,” he mumbles, firmly snuggling himself deeper under the covers for good measure. “Give it a couple hours before we call down the cavalry.”

Denny stays perched on the edge of the bed for a long while, jaw clenched and cold hands braced against his knees. The room has barely brightened since he first opened his eyes but it feels like he’s been awake for hours. Part of him wants to shout at Ezra for being a lazy idiot and the other part wants to lie back down in bed and sleep until spring returns or he’s dead, either pending.

“Hey,” Ezra’s voice comes again after a while, softer than before in its sleepiness. “How’s your head doing this morning? Let me see your face.”

 “Doesn’t ache anymore,” Denny sighs, temporarily defeated. He reaches up to press experimental fingers against his temple with a slight grimace. “Little bit sore.”

He twists around and wraps himself back up in blankets, head thumping on his cold pillow. A single white feather puffs into the air and then slowly drifts back down, both men watching it until it’s lost in the bedding between them. Ezra’s face crinkles up in sleepy mirth and Denny can’t help but smile at him.

“You got a bit of a shiner going,” Ezra says, and then slowly winks one eye. “Not too bad, though. Bet it looks better than my busted knee.”

Denny snorts at that and closes his eyes, drawing in a deep breath. Silence mingles between them again and his thoughts stray back to the hand print by the window. He weighs out his next words and then figures there’s no real sense in holding them back anyway, since they’ll sound crazy any which way he spins them. “I didn’t touch that cologne bottle,” he says, quiet. “But I smelled it when I woke up, too.”

Ezra blinks at him, mouth pulled down into a tiny frown. “What do you mean?”

“Think about it for a second,” Denny tells him. “If I didn’t touch it, and you didn’t touch it, then who the hell up here could’ve touched it?”

Without much warning there’s a small trill from somewhere beneath the bed and then four paws are springing up from the floor to land lightly on the covers. Denny flinches so hard he whacks his head into the iron headboard but Ezra lets out a small sound of delight, poking a hand out from under his mound of blankets to greet their new guest.

“Casper the friendly ghost right here must’ve been the culprit,” he says, waiting as the white cat pads up the bed to butt his head into Ezra’s palm. “I thought you smelled demons up here, dude. You probably just gave Denny another concussion.”

“Jesus Christ,” Denny says, eyeballing the creature while he rubs the crown of his head. “How did it even get in here? We shut both doors!”

“He must know all the secret passageways,” Ezra says, reaching above his head to stretch with a little grunt.

The big white cat plonks himself down in the middle of the bed without further invitation and starts to purr while Ezra scratches under his chin. Denny is only able to glare at him for a few feeble seconds before he gives in and has to reach out to touch the snowy fur, soft as a rabbit pelt. He strokes along the cat’s side as it rumbles like a motorboat beneath the palm of his hand. Ezra grins like he’s won some private bet with himself but if Denny’s being honest, this is by and large the best he’s felt all morning.

The cat purrs and they doze away under the weight of snowy morning. Rising day filters in through the salvaged glass of the old attic window and makes light move along the floorboards like seawater. Denny’s caught somewhere between waking and a dream, listening to the soft sound of Ezra’s breathing while he finds himself standing back down in the garden, this time verdant and lush without ice and snow.

He’s standing by the bird bath fountain and can smell the marigolds and dark-faced pansies planted at the base of it. Further off in the distance there’s a tall man in a red shirt with his back turned, busy pruning a climbing vine that has wound its way around the lamppost.

Denny watches him for some unknown amount of time while he works. When the man finally tosses his garden shears aside and turns he only holds up a broad hand in a lingering wave, as if they’d been good neighbors for years and years.

#

The white cat leads them downstairs at half past nine, long tail bent like a shepherd’s crook. Ezra has pulled his discarded sweatshirt back on and Denny is wrapped up in the old bathrobe again. They shuffle along toward the kitchen without saying much, pulled along by the promising smell of hot coffee and what might be bacon popping on the stove. Cat seems to smell it too, gaining a little pep in his step as he trots down the stairs to the first landing.

Ezra brushes his shoulder against Denny’s and reaches up to scratch through some of the stubble on his chin. “Do we look guilty?” he asks. “More importantly, do we smell guilty?”

“Yes on the first and hopefully not on the second,” Denny tells him.  

“How do I look guilty?” Ezra whispers, but Denny is already two steps ahead of him and walking into the sunlit kitchen.

Bonny Ann doesn’t even look up halfway from the stovetop, still busy turning bacon over and pushing scrambled eggs around in a skillet. “You can strip the bed and drop everything off in the laundry before you hit the road again,” she says, clapping her spatula on the pan before smoothing a hand down the front of her gingham apron. “Sheets probably haven’t been washed in ten years anyhow.”

“Uh…we’ll be sure to do that, thank you,” Denny says. He’s paused somewhere near the potbelly stove, still warm from the night before, and doesn’t even chance a look at Ezra. “Do you mind if I use your phone again so we can see about getting a tow?”

“No need,” Bonny Ann says, shuffling over to a cabinet in her fleece house slippers to fetch a stack of plates. “Take a look out front. Through the parlor and into the foyer.”

Denny’s mouth parts in question but he doesn’t speak. He turns and follows her directions without a word, moving past the covered furniture and crates packed with glassware and china in the lounge. Ezra isn’t far behind, close enough that the tail of Denny’s robe keeps brushing against his shins.

They unbolt the massive front door in the foyer and swing the heavy oak panel wide, stepping out onto the stone veranda dusted with snow. Somebody’s already been outside with the snow blower this morning and cleared a big portion of the hard-packed gravel drive and the little turnoff from the main road. Sitting there next to an old Chevy pickup is their rental car in all its glory, still crumpled at one corner of the front bumper with its sole surviving headlight but otherwise unharmed. Somebody had even taken the time to chip all the ice off the windshield.

“Well fuckin’ A,” Ezra says before letting out a whoop of laughter. “How’d she swing that?”

“I don’t know, but I’m glad,” Denny says, blowing out a sigh. He feels a knot of tension all but melt between his shoulders with one less burden on his mind ringing like an absolute godsend. He doesn’t venture off the porch yet without his boots, though he turns to Ezra and motions to go back inside the big house. “We ought to get the keys, come down and get some fresh clothes and stuff from the trunk.”

Back in the kitchen Bonny Ann is cool and unruffled, in the full swing of her usual morning routine despite any guests or not. She shakes a little dry food out into the cat’s dish and takes a deep and appreciative drink of black coffee from a cup big enough to pass as a soup bowl. Breakfast is steaming atop three plates on the table, though she doesn’t sit down herself until Denny and Ezra have each pulled back a chair and picked up a fork.

“I know you said you didn’t want cash but the least we could do is send you one of those edible arrangements or something,” Ezra says in earnest around a mouthful of toast. “Maybe some fancy booze if that’s more your speed.”

“What the hell for?” Bonny Ann asks, holding a piece of half-eaten bacon between her finger and thumb like it’s a cigarette. “Putting you up for one night in an empty house that needed the company? As if it was some big thing.”

Denny ponders whether the matter is worth pushing or not with a woman like Bonny Ann, whose convictions alone could probably keep a house standing in a hurricane. “You’re sure there isn’t any way we can repay the favor? Especially for getting the car towed—that couldn’t have been cheap, especially on a day like this.”

“I’ll tell you what you two can do,” Bonny Ann says after a few moments of chewing, eyes narrowing as she tips her head back just a little. “You can quit asking me how you’re supposed to pony up for common courtesy that I don’t put a price tag on, and then you can wash and dry the breakfast dishes if you really want to. And we’ll call it a bargain.”

Both men glance at each other from under their brows, momentarily paused in their chewing. Behind them the white cat has lit upon the countertop and jumped up to perch in the sunny windowsill behind the sink.

“I’m drying,” Ezra says quickly, and Denny supposes then that it’s a done deal.

#

The attic bedroom is transformed by daylight. Dust motes still drift and shimmer in the air but everything looks inviting once it’s not wrapped in shadow and dark corners. The stained glass window glows like jade now, casting little sidewinder ripples across the scarred hardwood. Denny and Ezra dress together in easy silence and then pull blankets and sheets from the old bed, folding the former and gathering the latter in a pile to bring downstairs.

 They sheepishly drop their linens and borrowed clothes in a hamper in the scullery, a long but brightly-lit little room that smells like lavender and an ancient remnant of hard lye. Bonny Ann is changed into jeans and a wool sweater when she rejoins them in the barren foyer, shrugging back into her husband’s old plaid coat while they all three stand under the brass and crystal chandelier.

“You boys got everything you came in with, right?” she asks, opening the big front door again. “I’m not mailing anybody’s knickers back down to Florida.”

Denny feels himself flush something awful but Ezra only flashes the edge of a grin. “How do you know I wear any to start with?”

“Touché,” Bonny Ann says with a nod before leading the way out into snowy midmorning. They follow her down the stone steps and crunch down the gravel drive to where the rental car is parked. Ezra leans inside to start the engine and heater and then bows back out again with his knit cap in hand, pulling it down over his ears while they wait for the car to start warming up.

A few songbirds are out and about despite the snow, flitting between trees and across the yard. Bonny Ann watches a pair of cardinals, the pretty scarlet male and his coppery lady friend, twitter and peep as they scratch around in some seed left out in a covered feeder.

“You know,” she says, not so much breaking into the quiet as gently elbowing against it. “I got to thinking last night, after the two of you came up soaked and half-dead through the woods, and I still can’t figure how you found me out here from the road.”

Denny remembers the gold light shining through the distant trees and speaks right away. “We saw a lamppost after our car ran off the highway,” he says. “Followed it through the trees until we found the inn’s sign and stumbled into your property there.”

The tip of Bonny Ann’s tongue rests on the edge of her bottom lip, caught there while something strange flickers across her face. “What lamppost are you talking about?”

Denny and Ezra look at each other and then the older woman. “The one on the access road, I guess,” Denny says, shifting between feet where he stands. “It—it looks like the one in the garden.”

“There isn’t one on the access road,” Bonny Ann says firmly. “You must’ve seen some trick of the light, but damned if I know how. The man who towed your car in this morning said it was plumb near five miles out from where we’re standing.”

“Oh,” Denny says. Ezra is uncharacteristically silent beside him. They’d both seen the light, touched it, bent down and looked at the inn’s painted sign under darkness and falling snow. “Maybe it was the light in the attic window, then.” 

Bonny Ann looks away again, gaze straying right to her pair of red birds. Her throat bobs some and her mouth pinches for just a moment, but she nods at last, chancing a look at Denny and Ezra despite the odd shine in her eyes.

“Now that I might believe,” she says softly, tucking her hands further into the deep pockets of her coat, far enough south that she might find warmer Texas soil there. “That, I could probably believe.”

   
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> feel free to follow me at dreamrafters.tumblr.com :)


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